Challenging Status Quo Of A Scientific Poster

“Most of the posters won’t catch the eye of a passerby. They are jammed with text and more text. They don’t have enough images, and the colors are boring. These posters are unattractive”

This words came from the jury of a scientific poster competition, at a meeting of my research consortia.

The only poster that got a positive review was mine because “it has less text and lots of colors”. Luckily they did not evaluate the quality of the contents.

Getting enough attention at a scientific poster presentation shouldn’t be difficult if you are presenting sound science. Right? After all, content is king. But presentation also matters and taking care how your science is displayed will attract extra eyes to your work.

Your Eye Looks For Sexy Scientific Posters

You have been to poster sessions and wandered around. What catches your eye? It’s either a keyword in the title or some of the artwork in the poster. Definitely it’s not going to be a big chunk of text.

You know what kind of posters you like to see and which ones you skip. Keep this in mind when preparing the next one. You can design an academic poster that is like a self-contained journal article (with intro, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion) or one that is less comprehensive but more attractive to the eye.

If you choose for the descriptive poster, you don’t need to stand by it, since it contains all the information a normal person would need. Just leave some handouts so they can figure out your work at home and go hit the free drinks.

In case you want to interact with people, you can also opt for a creative solution, trying to say more with images than with words. Describe your ideas and results in just enough detail to spark curiosity. People will come to you and ask for more.

Having Fun With Scientific Posters

Since we are scientists, why not use a poster as an experiment in itself to test the reaction of people to an out-of-the-box design?

The chances are that the poster session gets a bit boring. And since you have to prepare a poster anyway, why not having some fun in the process?

This is why Gareth Morris tried to spice up one of those boring poster sessions. He went the extra mile of using a professional designer to prepare an astonishing eye-candy scientific poster.

Julio Peironcely, PhD is the founder of Next Scientist and a PhD by Leiden University. He helps PhD students to stay motivated, be more productive and finish their PhDs. Follow him on Twitter (@peyron) or read more from him on JulioPeironcely.com.